


Pick Up A Rock

by CelestiaTrollworth



Series: Aftermath [1]
Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: Enterprise
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hope, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-26 16:39:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18720928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CelestiaTrollworth/pseuds/CelestiaTrollworth
Summary: Standing still is not always an option. Spock needs to do something, but what?





	Pick Up A Rock

**Author's Note:**

> Nick Mestral is still around Carbon Creek, Pennsylvania because of time travel. If you’ve read my other works, this takes place before any of them, in the immediate aftermath of the Fall of Vulcan.

 

Once the people who could have been begged for sound bites disappeared, the press went home. Vulcans did not generate good human interest stories even in distress. One reporter referred to them all as “sullen,” their inward grief properly invisible to stabbing eyes.

Spock put up with it as long as he could, then dredged up his old Terran civvies, threw on a heavy jacket with a hood and sped off to Pennsylvania in the middle of the night. The beam dropped him off at the transporter shed beside the port shuttle stop. Head down, hands jammed into pockets, he walked up the small valley to the oldest part of town.

The sun was beginning to rise over Chestnut Ridge, yellow and peach light touching the hard winter branches on the smaller hillsides up the road. He paused at the community center, where people were stirring inside, doubtless as unable to sleep as he had been. It was no doubt the place to check in,he he not already registered at the San Francisco embassy.

Sarek had stayed there to do what little he could, mostly staring at screens not allowing himself to hope for any familiar names. His raw grief was like wading in unseen blood and they were no comfort to each other. “If there were some reason,” Sarek had said earlier that night. “Were there a funeral for her. There is not.”

“Indeed. Do you wish to accompany me?”

For the first time, Spock knew he had made a tempting offer, and his father ran his fingers over the “close” icon on the window with the few names of the safe. “It is not logical to remove myself from our quarters, yet I desire to be away. Most would welcome an opportunity to be in a familiar place.”

“Her things are still there. It is...remarkably painful.” At one time, the admission would have earned him a lecture. This time, Sarek merely scrubbed a hand across his tired face and nodded.

“Just so. For what my advice may be worth to you, I believe you should go. There is far too much attention at Starfleet and you have no duties.”

“I will. If I can be of any use—“

“I would inform you. The transporter is fully functional. Use it as much as you need in either direction.” He drew a small breath for an even smaller sigh. “I do not believe it will be crowded.”

Where to go, then? He made his way slowly up the street and crossed at the corner. His great-grandfather fell into step, tired and unshaven. They walked to Nick’s house and Spock followed through the door he held open. For once, Nick didn’t offer to feed him beyond a brief hint of the thought. “Ah, hell, probably not. So.”

“So,” Spock said. Here, in the living room with the worn recliners, the edges were not as raw. There were family pictures, perhaps the only left of many relatives. “What now?”

“Good question. I’d say pick up a rock.”

He poked gently at Nick’s aura, finding it no more ragged than anyone else’s at the moment and much better shielded. The remark had not sprung from insanity. “Explain? I lack specifics.

Nick sat down and waved him toward the other chair. “After First Contact, I came back to rubble. It wasn’t the whole planet and everybody on it, but it was bad enough. Trees were all stunted and scrubby, the buildings we’d known were gone, the mine portal was hidden and damn good thing it was, and in place of town there were scattered beat-up little cabins like that one dug into Jake’s back yard.” He pointed out the front window, to a single-room building across the way carefully preserved with a historical plaque out front. “I looked around, found the coordinates for this place, nothing left on the surface. I found the porch foundations with a ground scan. Lived over the diner for nine years, here for fifty-seven, spent most of my time off out there when the weather was decent. That back porch was home. It wasn’t there, and of course Maggie and the rest weren’t, not with skin on.”

Honesty was always a welcome guest here. He pressed a hand to his ribs where everyone was missing. “The sensation. Cold steel.”

“Like a knife, yes. Physical. Also the stunned thinking, like a concussion, worse this time. I am assured it is because of the mental shock and may decrease with time. Even without the severe impact of the Great Loss, your mother was very much a part of your mind and you feel her absence. It is normal to grieve, no matter how you wish you would not.”

“That is most reassuring.” If his breath still wanted to catch on the jagged edges, the admission seemed to have lessened their sharpness. “You were saying, when you came...?”

Nick rocked his chair slightly, keeping his eyes on the cabin across the way. “I sat there on what should have been my spot with my head in my hands. After I got over the worst, Luke Krenath—Jake’s grandfather—must have seen me. The cabin door opened a crack, then he came out. ‘Nick,’ he said, ‘it’s still rough around here.’ I asked about the cabin. ‘We waited in the mine,’ he told me, ‘first while the war went over town, then while the radiation dropped. We had known what was coming, the news reports beforehand, and ships in orbit warned us some, so before they came we stripped the places we knew they would ruin, and we burned the buildings ourselves so the absence of religious artifacts and the library would go unnoticed. Everything we saved was back behind the rescue chambers in Four Left Main.’ Some of it was still there, waiting to be put to rights.”

Spock remembered the shape of the mine and designations of its places. A small nod to that effect sufficed.

“He told me they kept watching the radiation monitors until they dropped into the high edge of the green zone. ‘We Vulcans could come out first, as one would expect, and we had of course seen the results of our deliberate fires, but when we saw the disruption to the woods and what was left the shock was admittedly overwhelming.’ Luke handled it like I did, sat where his favorite spot should have been. Soon as he was able to move, he went to where his house had been and looked at what was left of the concrete block shed dug into the hill, and he realized it was full of ash and bits of wood, but the foundation was still kind of there. What heavy equipment they had was mostly back in the mine by the underground shop, weeks from being usable, but he had the urge to sleep on his own place. Not logical, no excuses made or necessary, he wanted to.”

“Just so, and it was...marginally possible.”

“Which it isn’t for you yet, but hear me out. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I picked up a rock. It was not especially large, but it was lying on a joist not as badly burned as it looked. I set it aside and picked up another rock. It was not large either, but it freed the joist to be set aside, perhaps to be trimmed and used, and so I spent the day. My wife was occupied with the communications gear and our daughter was working on the bulldozer and end loader. On the next day our son and his children came out and each of them picked up a rock. By sunset my daughter-in-law had brought enough cement from the old underground storehouse to make decent mortar. The next day we finished restoring the walls. We built only one room because the other Vulcans needed to do the same on their own properties. We constructed ours first so the humans and others would have more room in the shelter while we cleaned the worst radioactive waste. Jolin and I took our bedding to the cabin three days after I picked up a rock.’ Little things, see? Even the small steps are necessary.”

“You know more.” Of course he did; Spock knew he would have run straight to the Guardians to ask what to do. Perhaps that was the rock Nick had lifted first.

“Can’t tell you what little I did get out of them. They tell us there’s a way and we’ll find it. Anyhow. The survivors realized the upper fields had been hit only by very short-term radiation. Further investigation found that to be true of the whole area; the Augments has intended to remove the people and leave the land intact for their own use. The discovery was gratifying.”

Something remaining, in any condition, perhaps even the new colony...”Indeed.”

“When they holed up, they had taken in all the medicine they could find in town, plus an old ship’s replicator from one of our crashes. They also had the machine shop to fix it and a decent stockpile of canned and dehydrated food. Of course you know they rationed right and had decent nutrition for the time being.”

“Doubtless,” he replied. There would not be plenty, but there would be enough, and someone would be watching for any trace of malfunction in the replicator or spoilage in the supplies. All would have been managed, and yet, the thought of fertile soil...

“Still, even full-on Surakans desire fresh food. The heat and perpetual rain of the past fifty years was gone because of the stratospheric dust, so they brought out their cold-weather seed stock. Peas and cabbage, potatoes and carrots, the humans put in the first crops while the Vulcans set up each family’s first room as they had done their own.”

“They were not attempting to survive on the gardens, only...to begin.” Beginning. The ship might be damaged, but he still had laboratory privileges at the Academy where the small stock of Vulcan plants might have survived the loss of power and heat. The embassy also had a kitchen garden under glass, where small fruit and salad greens might be usable.

“The first radishes were ready three weeks later. The whole town shared them even though there was nothing else fresh to go with them yet. They knew people had survived down toward Butler and up in West Sunbury, so over the next month they got a vehicle running and went to swap part of their first peas for more mortar mix and nails. Zef and his bunch holed up on Bozeman Pass near where we’d landed, so nobody was around the old Cochran place. It had been too far out of town for the Augments to bother with. The apple trees had interesting hot pink fruit and the wild raspberries mutated into those big extra-sweet ones we have now, but all the scans called them safe and those pink apples are still around and most tasty. The spring on the hillside was flowing and clean enough that a simple sand filter got rid of what little radioactive dust was in it. “

He had the sudden urge to ask for one of the pink apples. Before he could, Nick nudged the fruit bowl on the table. The apples were last year’s, carefully stored. This year’s were not even in bloom yet. He wrapped the precious fruit in a napkin and began to bite carefully. Apples did not breed true, but he could always see what came of the seeds in the core. “Vulcan essentials. Fruit. Vegetables. Water.”

“Just so. They had enough clear plastic stored to cover a stack farm and keep their cool-weather crops growing way into the fall. We offered to take anyone to Vulcan who wanted to go, but nobody took us up on it. This was home, and they fixed it even if they had to lift a rock at a time.”

Spock leaned back, resting his head on the worn comfortable upholstery. There might be a way through the chaos; something he had pulled from the ashes might be usable. “How shall I start?”

Nick cocked an eyebrow. “Your dad has the survivor lists, John has the allied contacts. We need all the help we can get from the Border Romulans, but they’re so upset at what happened both times that they’re all but besieging the consulate. So many kind women among them have already stepped forward to offer to host embryos or get married. Even the ones who can’t get pregnant offered to help out men in trouble and that will save lives until we get what we can back. I do confess to some delicacy when the proprietors of three different service houses called on the same day, each extolling the virtues of her own employees, but the offer was as generous and real as any others.

He had heard a few of the offers. Border Romulans most definitely did not share the Vulcan reticence for discussion of bodily functions. “And most necessary in the present emergency. Ahem.”

“Yeah. Exactly.” Nick gestured with the remnants of his own apple. “There’s room on former colonies even if we manage the best scenarios. Old Cousin Selik suggests 3 Vaebn as a new home. Back in Surak’s kids’ time it was nuked to hell and gone too, same kind of weapons even, but we did that so long ago it’s safe and the climate is more than decent. Little bigger and cooler than the old place, slightly lighter gravity but comfortable for most, a little more oxygen, a lot less hydrogen sulfide, generally good soil. With a few fold-out buildings and the youngest, fittest survivors, we can get basic shelter up in a few days and deploy the big printers. The Council wants to build in the shape of the old cities and put back what landmarks they can.”

When would they ever need the shape and size of the old Vulcan cities? Still, anything they built would have to begin with shipping, with unfolding the standard military dual-use containers into apartments, with setting up the building printers and hauling in the bracing to be set into the framework. Whether they built one apartment complex or the whole of ShiKahr, the beginning was the beginning. “I have numerous artifacts in my quarters, both on board ship and in my room at the embassy in San Francisco.” The impossible, the hopeless, was in fact neither. What to do about enormous problems could wait while he dealt with small ones. “Despite the damage to the ship, the plant cultivars in my laboratory sustained less harm than one might think. What survives at the monastery rebuilt from the ruins of P’Jem may also be of use if the Andorians permit us to communicate with the cloister there.”

“Shras may make a proper show of combat with Sarek, but they deal.” Nick lifted a hand toward the small selection of Vulcan objects on his shelves. “The meditation rooms and the storage silos have much more, mostly old asenoi and statues, a few ceremonial garments left by the oldest people, all things that seemed a bit foolish to store at the time even though strictly speaking they were not to be discarded. Your grandmother Rana will sort through what we have here. Nothing is priceless and none of it is likely to meet her standard of cultural purity, but it’s what she has to work with.”

“Just so.” Winter sun had reached the side window. “I will soon require meditation—“

“Don’t we all? I was coming back from an all-nighter in the Black Chapel when we met. Try the back porch. If not, there are two dozen rooms at the community center.”

“I believe the porch will be suitable.” He rose to go back through the house.

“Take a cup of coffee with you. Too bad I can’t offer you the Post-Gazette. Coffee and the newspaper comics always helped my thinking. Kid, this is a hell of a deal but you have my word, we’ll get by.”

Nick went to the garage, no doubt to consult the portal guard. He went to the kitchen with its perpetual coffeepot, filled one of the big white mugs from the counter and stepped onto the low porch. People were beginning to move around town; he shielded his mind from their shaky thoughts, stared at the rising steam from his cup, and sipped the strong dark brew. Humans jarred themselves awake with caffeine, while most Vulcans found it calming. The familiar soothing warmth began to ripple down his raw nerves. He bent down from the edge of the porch and picked up a smooth quartz pebble. “Today,” he said. “I can start today.”


End file.
